MOORE’S SUMMARY: Members of the Illinois House Legislative Black Caucus said they “remain open to thoughtful, data-driven refinements” to the landmark criminal justice reform law known as the SAFE-T Act, but will not consider measures that undermine the goals of the law, which eliminated cash bail as a condition of pretrial release.
NOT GOING BACK: In a lengthy statement released Monday, the 22-member caucus said in part that they’re “not going back to a system where penalty enhancements, jailing more people, ignoring root causes and underinvesting in our communities were treated as public safety policy.”
“That system was not just. It was not smart. And it did not make us safer,” they wrote. “We will not support legislation that carries the remnants of the system we left behind, because those approaches are adversarial to this work, adversarial to fairness, and adversarial to real public safety.”
WHY IT MATTERS: The Black Caucus carries significant clout underneath the Capitol dome. On top of muscling through the SAFE-T Act and several other criminal justice reform laws in recent years, they, along with progressives, have killed several penalty enhancement proposals. With House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch’s rule that support from 60 House Democrats is necessary for a bill to be called for a vote, the caucus’ buy-in is almost always necessary for anything to pass.
LOTS OF CHATTER: State Rep. Justin Slaughter, D-Orland Park, told Capitol News Illinois that the statement wasn’t in response to anything specific but to “lots of chatter” from Republican lawmakers and candidates about the law. He accused them of “cherry-picking some incidents and then kind of standing them up as defining them as what the system was all about.”
Gov. JB Pritzker and Welch have also said in recent months that they would be open to small changes to the law, though they haven’t been specific.
The law is often the target of conservative ire, especially after high-profile instances of crime, like the November attack on 26-year-old Bethany MaGee, who was set on fire on a CTA Blue Line train. Her alleged attacker, Lawrence Reed, has been arrested 72 times and was out on electronic monitoring during the attack despite prosecutors seeking his detention in an earlier case. WGN reported as the time that a Cook County judge denied prosecutors’ request to keep Reed detained while awaiting trial.
More recently, the murder of Loyola student Sheridan Gorman put a spotlight on the law. The man charged in her murder, Jose Medina, had an outstanding warrant for his arrest after he missed a court date following a shoplifting arrest. Medina was also living in the U.S. without legal permission, drawing criticism for the state’s TRUST Act, which limits how local law enforcement can interact with federal immigration authorities.
“Sometimes you just have unfortunate incidents, and it’s not about the old system or the new system,” Slaughter said. “Nothing is 100% perfect.”
Caucus members insist that the law is working, pointing to statistics showing that – in a mirror of national trends – violent crime is down across Illinois and Chicago. Homicides were down 30% year-over-year in the nation’s third-largest city, which recorded the lowest number of murders in 60 years.
WHAT’S NEXT? The House Democrats’ public safety working group continues to meet. But don’t expect any large-scale revamps to move through the legislature. As Democratic leaders have indicated, changes would be small. Think in the vein of a trailer bill.
In the meantime, you can sign up for our twice-weekly Capitol News Insider newsletter. You won’t be charged, but will have the option to become a paying subscriber to retain access to coverage like this once we fully launch Capitol News Insider.
